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http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/printarticle/gam/20021207/COREX7

Pistol-packing profligates

How can we trust Ottawa to predict the cost of Kyoto
when it's firing blanks on other budget overruns?

By REX MURPHY

Saturday, December 7, 2002 – Print Edition, Page A25

We must be very, very grateful that those who own guns have better aim than those who want to control guns. The combined brainpower and foresight of Homer Simpson and Mr. Magoo couldn't have composed the billion-dollar nullity that is still ludicrously referred to as our national gun registry.

It is incomplete, out of control, and is a typhoon of overspending. Furthermore, its accounting has been a prodigy of slyness and concealment.

If the money available to build a gun registry were available to our health-care system, Canada would now have more hospitals than convenience stores, every citizen would be assigned at birth two personal physicians (a specialist and a GP), and we would have our own medical space program consisting of a girdle of MRI clinics circling the planet.

Were it available under the same invulnerable inexhaustibility to our armed services, St. John's would now be servicing its own fleet of aircraft carriers,Toronto would have its own army under General Lastman (just for snowy mornings), and our navy would summon up, in its magnitude and multitude, memories of the British fleet in the high noon of empire.

But neither health care nor the armed services have the same purchase on the government's priority list as that enjoyed by a program designed to disarm farmers, build files on seal hunters, and bring a little touch of Kafka to the gun clubs of a notoriously pacific nation. Two dollars in gun control, by the current reckoning, is worth $860 to $1,000 in any other budget: $2-million is roughly the same as $1-billion.

Of course, health care and the armed services are examples of public policy that offer real advantage, advantage that can be measured and felt, pointed to and given a name. They are thus constrained by real accountability, some visible and less than hilarious balance between what is projected to be spent and what is actually spent -- as opposed to gun control.

The latter is a fog of feel-goodism dressed up as crime prevention, condescension toward our hillbilly American neighbours (theirs is a "gun culture"), and urban snobbery. It is the yuppie disdain for pastimes yuppies do not know and which do not involve them, pastimes toward which they are licentiously contemptuous and implacably determined to obliterate.

There is not enough money in the world to satisfy the hunger of a policy that is pointless to begin with. And so there is naturally no limit to what will be spent, how it is spent -- and how carefully how much has been spent has been concealed, as it inflated toward infinity, by the authors of such useless and offensive legislation.

Gun control is oxymoronic at the heart of its being. It harasses the law-abiding (only the virtuous register their guns) and obliges the ne'er-do-wells (criminals never do).

A question waits to be asked in Parliament: What protection from money already spent was afforded to the citizens of Toronto in recent murder sprees that saw 10 dead in little over a month on the city's streets? What did gun registration do to prevent those killings or track the killers? Answer: It probably ruled out most of Saskatchewan's permanent residents as primary suspects. Thank God for computer registry. In the old days, we'd have to put up with calling in Matlock for a deduction of this calibre.

Gun registry is not nuclear physics. Some people own guns. And the government wants their names and a list of the guns they own. It takes an imagination greater than I can call on to figure out how a process that seems to plain can be so extravagantly misjudged as to its costs.

Maybe the government isn't very hot when it comes to projecting costs. Enter the Kyoto dragon. The planet's climate is an infinitely more complicated system than a list of guns and their owners. The science of climate control is still in short pants. The economics of climate control is yet to be weaned.

So when, with a confidence that mimes their confidence on the costs of "gun control," the federal government tells us Kyoto will not "significantly impact" our economy, I think the response of every sane citizen should be to weep.

Weep till you can weep no more -- because the mathematicians on the Liberal front bench are about to be loosed once more. And this time, they are not costing a list. It's the wind and the sky, sunshine, ice and rain, ice ages past and ice ages to come, the progress of glaciers and the fate of the icecaps, the history of the trade winds and the awesome mechanics of solar flares.

Are they up to the job? Can you doubt it? W. O. Mitchell, your question is answered: Who has seen the wind? Herb Dhaliwal and David Anderson. And they can cost it, too.
Rex Murphy is a commentator with CBC-TV's The National and host of CBC Radio One's Cross-Country Checkup.